


Teen Wolf, Season 1, Episode 5, The Tell

by TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Analysis, Episode Review, Episode: s01e05 The Tell, Meta, Nonfiction, Season/Series 01, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-20
Updated: 2018-09-20
Packaged: 2019-07-14 17:46:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16045439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer/pseuds/TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer
Summary: Warning: Contains spoilers for both the episode and the rest of the series. Complete.





	Teen Wolf, Season 1, Episode 5, The Tell

Open to a man trying to fix a light in a video store.

Outside, Jackson tries to convince Lydia to let them watch a movie he wants to watch. Promising she’ll like it, he declares he’s not watching The Notebook again.

Part of why I hate this pairing and despise season 1-2 Lydia is the way Lydia approaches the relationship. She pretends to be bad at bowling so Jackson will look good, and then, she acts like those entitled partners who think they should be allowed to control movie, music, food, etc.

Inside, Jackson eventually finds the now dead employee. Alpha Peter attacks, and at one point, the lights go out. As Jackson is trapped underneath rental shelves, Lydia is too busy taking selfies to notice anything is amiss.

For all my issues with her, I refuse to condemn her here. Some people are simply majorly unobservant to the world around them when they’re engrossed in something.

Bursting through the window, alpha Peter runs away.

Meanwhile, in a squad card, Stiles and Sheriff S are eating, and the latter is mildly annoyed about his lack of curly fries. The dispatch radio comes on, and with his mouth full, Stiles expositions the dispatcher just used police code to report a possible murder.

At the rental store, Jackson is incredibly obnoxious in dealing with the police.

On top of the roof, Derek and Scott watch the scene. Assuring Scott not all werewolves are killers, Derek says they’re going to find out why this one is going on a murder spree.

Back at Derek’s house, Scott complains about how this is screwing up his attempts at normality. He mentions an upcoming parent-teacher conference. Derek says, if Scott doesn’t kill with the alpha during the next full moon, the alpha will kill him. He cites it as a rite of passage.

This goes against his previous statement. If he’d said something along the lines of, ‘not all alphas do this,’ the two statements wouldn’t be contradictory. As it is, intentional or not, there’s now an implication Derek helped his alpha kill as a rite of passage.

Telling him pain will keep him human, Derek gives a practical demonstration.

The next morning, over at the Argent house, Kate apologises for her behaviour the night before and gives Allison her birthday present. It’s a family heirloom necklace.

At school, Allison finds balloons and a card in her locker. She believes they’re from Lydia, and I’d think it was adorable if they were. However, someone made a strong case for how it could have been Peter.

She tries to shove the balloons back in, but Scott sees them. It’s revealed she’s seventeen, and Scott makes her happy when he casually and correctly notes she was held back due to her family moving around so much.

Then, he convinces her to skip the day with him.

In chemistry, Harris’s attempt to publicly embarrass Scott doesn’t work as well as he intended due to Scott being MIA. Heh. Jackson comes in, and showing genuine concern, Harris makes it clear he can be excused at any time if he starts to feel bad.

Stiles asks Danny several questions about Lydia and Jackson, and he unintentionally hits a sore spot when he expresses disbelief Jackson didn’t talk to Danny about the whole rental store attack due to them being best friends. Then, he asks if Danny finds him attractive.

Originally, I did think Stiles was written as heterosexual with scenes such as this intended to be comedic and help present the idea heterosexual males can be comfortable around gay males, but eventually, it got to a point where I can’t help but read Stiles as bisexual.

Outside, Allison is nervous about leaving, and Scott literally begs her to start the car.

In the locker room, there’s a tense scene where Jackson briefly mistakes another player for the alpha. Then, it’s revealed Derek has arrived at some point.

Jackson is terrified, and Derek makes him repeat his claim he didn’t see anything the night of the rental attack in a slower and calmer tone.

I’m assuming this is so he can get a better read on whether Jackson’s heart and breathing naturally changes when he makes the claim.

The problem is: Werewolves more-or-less work the same way lie-detectors do, and lie-detectors aren’t reliable. Various law enforcement agencies have publicly acknowledged this.

Now, the werewolves have an advantage of, if a person doesn’t know they’re using preternatural abilities, the people’s natural biological responses not being affected by the knowledge they’re being read, but even then, I sincerely doubt a practised liar experiences much, if any, change.

Seemingly satisfied, Derek sarcastically suggests Jackson get the wounds he left on Jackson’s neck looked at.

This is one of these scenes were I hope unreliable narration can be applied. Derek isn’t stupid, and he had to know, even with it clearly being sarcasm, his words could have planted a seed in Jackson’s head.

If Jackson does take this advice, there’s a possibility the human doctors will discover a medical mystery to be solved, and if he tells them who is responsible for the marks, Derek will once again have police looking to haul him in. This time it’ll be so doctors can perform tests on him.

In the hallway, Stiles talks to Scott on the phone. He babbles about Lydia being absent and Jackson being a ticking time bomb, and hanging up, Scott directs Allison to turn somewhere. Doing so, she shows awesome protective instincts when she automatically reaches over to restrain him when making a sharp turn.

They get out, and it’s established she doesn’t expect him to take the blame if they get caught. Joking about throwing one another under the bus, they kiss.

Meanwhile, at Lydia’s, she’s heavily medicated, and her mother has no problem leaving her incapacitated teenage daughter alone in a room with a boy neither she nor her daughter knows very well.

Thus, Natalie Martin’s horrible parenting is established. The audience knows Stiles won’t do anything to harm Lydia, but in real life, something like this could easily end in tragedy.

As it is, Stiles simply looks at her bottle of pills and has some fun watching her struggle to repeat a tongue twister. He asks about what she saw when Jackson was attacked, but he screws himself by giving her a leading question about mountain lions.

In the woods, Allison texts Lydia a thank-you for the balloons and card.

Back at Lydia’s, she throws herself at Stiles, but he stops things when she reveals she thinks he’s Jackson. I sincerely hope he would have stopped things regardless of whether she knew who he was. Her phone dings, and if this isn’t unreliable narration, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt. He could have been thinking she’ll want to know who it is despite being unable to answer it herself.

Picking it up, he accidentally pulls up the video/picture from the rental store, and there’s a blurry image of the alpha.

At Derek’s, Kate leads two men inside where Derek is working out. One of the men makes a dog joke, and expecting him to come up with better material, Kate supplies him with suggestions. Derek attacks both men, but interestingly, he makes a point to wait until Kate withdraws her Taser baton to attack her.

This is something I’ve always found extremely notable: Aside from when he achieves his full shift, assuming for the moment Kate was really Kate, he never physically hurts Kate, and even then, he could have outright killed her but didn’t. When she later has him chained up in the basement, he growls and bars his teeth, but he doesn’t make contact, and I’m not convinced it was the chains that stopped him.

In Stiles’s room, he leaves an angry voicemail promising to kill Scott in an unspecified way if Scott doesn’t return his calls. He hangs up, and Sheriff S appears. He hopes to hear good news at the parent-teacher conference. Stiles doesn’t give him much hope for this. Heh.

He leaves, and it’s revealed Stiles took Lydia’s phone. Watching the video, he wonders aloud where Scott is.

The answer is having a lovely-dovey montage with Allison.

Eventually, Stiles deletes the video.

Either this is unreliable narration, or he does this due to thinking he won’t have time to show Scott before Lydia realises her phone is missing and believes seeing the image sober will only further Lydia’s emotional issues. In the latter case, why he didn’t send it to his phone or Scott’s, however, and then, delete both it and him/Scott from the sent history, I don’t know. I can believe Stiles would delete the video in order to protect Lydia’s psyche, but I have a hard time believing he wouldn’t also do the above.

Meanwhile, Kate sadistically follows a crawling Derek around with the Taser baton. She say the Argents weren’t responsible for Laura being used as bait. She offers to take care of the alpha who did it if he’ll just give her information on said alpha. He doesn’t believe her, but coming over, she orders him to listen to her vital signs. Then, she realises he doesn’t know who the alpha is.

She briefly turns. When she turns back and starts shooting, he’s already out of the house and running.

At the vet, Deaton calls Scott. It’s established this isn’t the first call he’s made, but not annoyed in the slightest, he suggests Scott forgot he was supposed to come in. He asks him to please call so that Deaton doesn’t have to worry about him.

Even knowing how shady Deaton is, I’ve always enjoyed seeing the quasi father-son relationship Deaton and Scott have.

Sheriff S appears, and he asks about the mountain lion theory. He shows Deaton some pictures a parking lot camera managed to catch the night of the rental incident. Two of them show an animal figure, and one of them shows a human figure in the same spot. Deaton hurriedly excuses himself to take care of a barking dog.

Now night, Scott and Allison get in her car. She thanks him for the birthday, and he does a title-drop by saying he knows she’s not lying due to knowing her what her tell is. Then, they realise the parent-teacher night is going on.

About this bizarre set up for parent-teacher night: From my experience, parent-teacher nights are when parents, often with their kids in tow, all visit their kid’s teacher(s). Usually, the parents and kids meet in the teacher’s room, and the teacher may talk to some of them off to the side with or without the kid(s), but it’s not the teacher and each kid’s parent(s) alone in a room.

Moving on, there’s a scene of Harris talking to Jackson’s parents. He describes Jackson as unusually driven, and Mr Whittemore replies they wish Jackson would ease up on himself a bit. There’s intercutting shots of Jackson drunkenly practising lacrosse as they discuss Jackson’s issues being the result of being adopted.

Is a head!canon when you know something isn’t true but choose to sort of believe it anyway? Or is there another term? Either way, I always knew my theory of Harris being Jackson’s biological father would never happen in canon, and I know there’s no chance it might be one of the ones confirmed via apocrypha, but I still choose to operate under it.

In another classroom, Lydia’s divorced parents argue in front of the teacher, and Natalie blames Mr Martin for telling Lydia to choose where she wanted to live.

Depending on how it was done, I don’t think this was a bad thing. Usually, divorced parents, especially of older children, do encourage their child/ren to decide where they’d feel the most comfortable living. Of course, if Lydia’s dad made her feel guilty/tried to buy her affection, then, I can see how it would screw her up.

The teacher assures them Lydia is brilliant both academically and socially, and there are intercutting shots of Lydia putting on makeup and dressing.

Roden does a good job of showing Lydia insisting on being strong the only way she currently knows how despite her vulnerability.

Meanwhile, the coach talks to Sheriff S, and there’s an unreveal of Stiles’s first name. It’s established to be his maternal grandfather’s name. Intercut with Stiles looking at the report on Derek’s house fire, Sheriff S is told Stiles wrote a report on the history of male circumcision during a final. He starts to defend the importance of the topic, but it’s revealed the final was for economics.

As funny as this is, I’m sure Sheriff S would know what the coach taught at the beginning of the meeting. It’s an awesome joke, but it doesn’t work if given some thought.

In Melissa’s meeting with Harris, she leaves an angry voicemail for Scott. Harris really annoys me by saying Scott is lacking a male authority figure. If he’d said Scott needed better parenting, I’d be on his side. Melissa is perhaps a bit too hands-off for Scott’s own good. But not every kid needs a parent of their own gender. Not every kid needs two parents.

As he continues talking about Scott needing extra attention, there’s a shot of Scott in the car, and his eyes turn yellow when the light hits them.

In another class, a teacher talks to the Argents, and she warns them Allison might develop a bit of rebelliousness due to all the moving around. It’s revealed she didn’t attend school today.

Allison and Scott pull up to the school, and Melissa and the Argents meet outside. Chris is incredibly rude to Melissa, and he accuses Scott of kidnapping Allison.

Here’s a large part of my problem with Chris when it comes to Allison: In his eyes, Allison’s either completely helpless and in constant need of protection, or she’s going down a horrible path he has to stop her from taking whenever she mildly acts out.

Allison skipped school for one day, something she has apparently never done before. If he thinks non-abusive punishment is warranted, fine, but acting like this is uncalled for.

If I had skipped a day of school as a teenager, there’s a good chance I would have been in trouble for an extremely long time, but I can say with relative certainty no one in my family would have been accusing any of my schoolmates of kidnapping me to said schoolmates parent(s). And if certain family members did believe I might have genuinely been kidnapped, right or wrong, I’m not sure they would have restrained themselves to simply making a verbal accusation.

The two teenagers make their presence known, but the crowd suddenly starts panicking. Scott saves Allison from getting hit by a car, Sheriff S is actually hit by a car, and Chris shoots what turns out to be an actual mountain lion.

Even if he's licensed to carry concealed, he’s not law enforcement, and therefore, having the gun on school grounds is a serious legal no-no and might actually fall under ‘felony’, but I imagine the fact he supplies weapons to law enforcement and the fact he did stop a potentially rabid animal from hurting anyone would cause Sheriff S to cut him some slack.

On another note, Bourne does great here. Chris has always been a conflicted man, and this wordless scene at the end shows it. He's a killer, but he's never taken any pleasure in killing, and the fact his daughter has seen this greatly upsets him. The fact Scott, a potential werewolf, has seen it- it might be a necessity, but it's not a victory.

Weirdly, this is where the episode ends.

Fin.


End file.
